The Rating Wars

Professor Ryan Claycomb is a victim of student rage.
“As best as I can tell from grammatical tics, it was a particular student disgruntled with his low grade,” he says. “[He] posted six times about how bad I was.”
Such is the curse potentially felt by over 770,000 rated professors on ratemyprofessor.com, a Web site that keeps track of student evaluations of professors' ease of course, helpfulness, clarity, and -- because it would hardly be a true representation of student assessment without it -- their attractive factor, so appropriately marked by a chili pepper.

It may be harsh reality for some professors, but then again, it allows the professor to know how well they’re actually doing."

- Kevin Nho, junior at UC San Diego

“I printed the page out and posted it on my office wall as a reminder of two things,” Claycomb says. “How personal the classroom can feel to everyone involved, and how vitriolic feedback can look a lot more pervasive than it really is.”

After seven years combined of teaching as a Lecturer at the University of Maryland and as an Assistant Professor at George Washington, Claycomb is now in his second year as an Assistant Professor at West Virginia University. And RMP has been kinder to him since the multiple-posting outburst.

“I’m pretty proud of my RMP rating here at this moment, which rates me high on helpfulness and clarity, but pretty low on the easiness scale,” he says. “It’s the chili pepper, or absent chili pepper, that cuts pretty deep.”